let’s have that coffee, then.’
Miranda straightened her back.
‘Yes, let’s. Black for me. Thanks.’
There was a small silence in the wake of her words. Amos seemed to become aware of four pairs of eyes on him.
‘What’s this? What are you all looking at?’
The reverberations of Selwyn’s sledgehammering made the cups on the dresser tinkle.
Polly murmured, ‘What do you mean, looking at?’
Amos puffed out his red cheeks but didn’t pursue the question. He lumbered about the kitchen collecting up the coffee pot and rummaging in the cupboards for coffee beans. Once he had located the jar he experienced a moment’s difficulty with fitting the lid on the grinder, then pressed the button as gingerly as if he expected the machine to detonate.
Polly read out over the clatter, ‘Erasmian fool, M 37, seeks warm-hearted man, London or Cambridge, to explore gravity and grace. Downhill skiing champion preferred.’ Colin shuddered. Amos stared briefly at them over his shoulder.
‘Is there any milk?’ he asked Miranda.
‘Have a look in the fridge.’
By the time he had produced two cups of coffee and set one down in front of Miranda, the other three had got up and were preparing to leave.
‘Might have a drink at the pub,’ Colin said, winding a scarf of Indian silk around his neck.
The kitchen was quiet after they had gone.
‘Why do I suddenly feel like the butt of some incomprehensible joke?’ Amos said abruptly into the silence.
Miranda thoughtfully drank some coffee, then replaced the cup in its saucer.
‘Do you?’
‘It reminds me of when we were students. It’s all coming back to me. I was forever arriving a crucial minute too late, after the decision had been made or the punch line delievered. Have I spent getting on for forty years demonstrating that I am not some egregious hanger-on, only to step back into a room with all of you in it to feel a callow nineteen all over again?’
The corners of Miranda’s mouth lifted. ‘I don’t know. But isn’t it rather good, in its way? Rather rejuvenating?’
He stared at her, trying to work out whether he was being teased.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Miranda made herself be serious. ‘You’re not going to regret moving up here, Amos, are you?’ She didn’t want any of them to regret the decision, not even for a moment.
‘Katherine loves it.’ Amos’s expertise in deflecting questions was considerable. ‘Even in the car when we were driving up, I noticed how gleeful she was. She likes the life here better than living with me in London, that’s quite obvious. She seems happier now than at any time since the boys left home.’ He added, ‘Of course, I’m glad about that.’ His big hands, lightly clasped, rested on the table.
Miranda stood up and came to him. She put her arm over his shoulders and Amos flinched, just perceptibly, as if he feared what might happen next.
‘What about you?’ she murmured.
‘I want to get my house built.’
‘Yes. But what do you feel about being here at Mead, with the rest of us? We did all that talking about money and business and land and security and contracts, but I don’t think we – or you – did much more than mention the communal aspects.’
‘It’s a business arrangement, isn’t it?’ Amos said briskly. He ducked his head from beneath Miranda’s chin.
Miranda stood upright. Her expressive face showed the depth of her conviction. ‘But I want it to be more than that. For me, for Mead, for all of us. I want it to be about faith, and friendship, and the way that those values outlast, survive longer than marriage. Children grow up and go. Partners die, or leave, or whatever they do. What have you got left that means more than what we have here, the six of us?’
‘How about work? Call it achievement, if you prefer. Hindsight, that’s always a gift. Wealth, even, if you like. Quite a number of significant things, anyway.’
She slid her narrow hands into the back pockets of her trousers and paced away to the dresser.
‘I was thinking more emotionally.’
He widened his eyes in a show of amazement. ‘Really? You were, Mirry, of all people?’
‘Stop it, Amos. You said a minute ago that you felt unnerved by being with us again. That’s an emotional response. It’s an acknowledgement that we do have something significant here, between us all, old friends.’
Her eyes met his. The lids drooped and there were fans of wrinkles at the corners but otherwise her face was not much altered by the years. Miranda had always been a beauty. As far as Amos was concerned she was one of those women who ought to come stamped with a warning notice. Luckily, he might have added, she was not his cup of tea.
He said, ‘What we’ve got here is Selwyn going berserk, Polly being exaggeratedly patient with him, my wife suddenly as happy as Larry in spite of our various not insignificant problems, Colin who is clearly ill, you being your mystical self, and me, waiting for the bloody builders to come and start building my house.’
Miranda saw that Katherine had been right, the rain had stopped and a dilute sun now shone in on them.
Amos muttered, ‘But, even so, I’m moderately pleased to find myself here.’
Her smile reflected the sun. She skipped back to his side, kissed the top of his head and flattened his upstanding hair.
‘Oh, that’s good. Very good.’
‘I don’t know how it will turn out, though,’ he warned her. ‘I bought into a plot of rural land for development, at a good price, thank you, not into a new-age nest of nightmares.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ Miranda laughed.
Colin and Polly and Katherine took the footpath that skirted a series of fields on the way to Meddlett. The sky to the west was the blue of a bird’s egg, and the yellow leaves in the hedges hung luminous in the oblique light. Polly led the way, brushing through soaking long grass and tramping down the arms of brambles so that the others could pass. She walked briskly, and soon drew ahead. Katherine found that she was breathing hard, and looked back to see whether Colin wanted to overtake her. But he was strolling with his hands in his pockets, apparently studying the edge of the rain clouds where a bright rim of liquid gold shone against the grey.
The clean, damp air swelled her lungs. She liked the gleam of the wet leaves, and the iridescent trails of slugs glossing the stones.
Katherine was unused to country walking. She had grown up in Hampstead, and Sunday walks on the Heath with her parents had marked the limits of rural exploration. She had lived all her married life with Amos in London, and apart from occasional games of tennis and some gentle skiing there had been no call to exert herself. In his forties Amos had taken to going on trekking holidays, but always with male friends and colleagues. The idea of leaving the boys and accompanying him to Nepal had seemed so far-fetched to her in those days that it had never even been discussed. Nowadays Amos was too heavy for the mountains, and preferred a tropical beach.
Polly sat down on a stile and waited for her to catch up.
‘Am I going too fast?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but I like it. You know the way?’
‘Sel and I walked along here the other night.’
‘Did you? Going to the village?’
Polly shook her head. ‘Just